Life after Death
After death comes grief, and after grief comes cleaning. Lots and lots of cleaning. She's seventeen now, she can do magic out of school, and the first thing she's using it for is cleaning the attic, clearing out her mother's possessions, packing them up, giving them away, torching the pyre.
It's a little awkward, getting down from Scotland, because he isn't seventeen yet and he can't apparate, nor can he fly. But he explains to his parents, he explains that it's really, really important, and they let him take the Knight Bus from Glasgow to Cumberland, to the modest stone house in the modest stone-walled village is the bare and forbidding border landscape.
The door is opened by her father, who looks like hell. He blinks at him, says nothing, points upstairs. Ernie puts out his hand and says, "Nice to see you again, sir." He crosses the threshold and says, "I was so sorry to hear about your loss, sir." Her father stares, blinks, points upstairs.
He climbs two flights of stairs in a silence so stark he can hear it. He raps on the attic door and she calls in a sweet, tired voice, "Come in." He steps gingerly across the floorboards and she says, "Hello, Ernie." He didn't tell her he was coming, but she doesn't seem surprised.
They sit a moment in the stillness and Ernie asks, "Where is everyone?"
She says, "Sarah's at work."
"On a Sunday morning?"
Hannah shrugs. "Sarah's been working seven-day weeks all summer. She says it's the war, but I think she just doesn't want to be here."
"Where's Benjy?" Benjy is her ten-year-old brother, popularly known as "The Afterthought."
"He's staying with my grandparents."
"Your Muggle grandparents?"
"Do I have any other grandparents?" asks Hannah tartly. She is the daughter of a witch and a wizard, but all four of her grandparents are Muggle. The Abbotts are what is known as a Muggle-identified family, in which magic is used sparingly and a great deal of time in spent with Muggle relatives, on the other side of the invisible wall that separates the Muggle and magical worlds.
He says, "The Scots or the Brits?"
She shrugs. "He's with Mum's family right now. He's going to Dad's next week." She pauses. "They're up in arms, all four of them. They don't want Benjy to go to Hogwarts."
He stares aghast. "Benjy has to go to Hogwarts. It's the only school in the U.K."
"Well, no, it isn't actually," says Hannah shortly, but her eyes are laughing. "It's the only wizarding school in the U.K."
"That's what I meant," says Ernie.
"There are thousands of other options for ten-year-old boys, if one isn't too particular about the spellwork," continues Hannah. "Thousands of options, ranging from the toniest prep schools down to the village primary by my grandparents' croft in the Orkneys."
"But he's magic," protests Ernie. "Isn't he?"
Hannah rolls her eyes. "Of course he is. Squibs only run in pureblood families. Funny, isn't it, how the Death Eaters hate non-magical people, but they kill perfectly capable, talented Muggle-born witches and wizards and they don't kill Squibs . . ."
There's no response to that. He waits a minute and then he says quietly, "Hannah, you have to stand up for Benjy. I'll help you. I'll talk to your grandparents if you like. I'll ask my father to talk to your grandparents." He pauses. "What does your father say? He doesn't want Benjy to give up his education, does he?"
"Dad can't make any decisions right now. You saw him, didn't you?" He nods. She says quietly, "They want to send to him to a sanatorium."
Ernie wrinkles his brow. "You know, Hannah, I don't think there is a sanatorium in Britain—"
"A Muggle sanatorium," says Hannah sharply, looking away. "A Muggle sanatorium. They want to shut up the house, put Dad in a sanatorium, have Sarah and me go live with them—one with one set of grandparents, one with the other—put Benjy in a Muggle school . . ."
The full implications of these revelations sink in slowly. The full implications, followed by the terror. He thinks, they're dropping out. He's heard of it. It happened once or twice in the First War. They paid the price of being magic and now they're dropping out. The entire Abbott family is dropping out. He thinks, I'm going to lose Hannah. . .
"But you're seventeen," says Ernie, his voice shaking.
"Yeah," says Hannah, "I'm seventeen. Sarah's almost twenty. But they're not going to let us live on our own, not even together, not after what happened to Mum. And I can't live with them. I just can't. I don't understand how Benjy can. I love them, but we just don't speak the same language." She lowers her voice and says, "It's so hard, going back and forth all the time." She has never said that before. She takes a deep breath and says almost inaudibly, "I have to see them next weekend, and they're going to forbid me to go back to Hogwarts . . ."
"But you're seventeen," objects Ernie.
"They don't really understand about that," says Hannah. "You see, in the Muggle world, kids come of age at eighteen."
Oh, yeah. He knows that, actually. He did an OWL in Muggle Studies, mainly because he thought it would help him understand Justin and Hannah, but the course was all about stupid things like gas stoves and airplanes, not anything useful. He has a hard time remembering all those odd restrictive Muggle laws, because in wizarding society—"But Hannah, you're seventeen," says Ernie again.
"I know," says Hannah morosely.
"What can they do, lock you up?" says Ernie. "You'd just apparate."
"I know," says Hannah. "I know. But I don't want it to come to that. With all we've been through so far . . ."
Yes, he thinks. Yes. With all we've been through so far. It has been barely six years since he met her, since he knew there was a Hannah Abbott in the world, and less than two since he—well, since they—but it's been a long two years. It's been a long six years.
Macmillans live long lives. Ernie's parents, his grandparents, all eight of his great-grandparents, are alive and kicking, strolling about Glasgow's tiny wizarding quarter, breeding Kneazles, levitating melancholy fish out of the Clyde, sewing tartan pajamas for their unwilling great-grandson, and writing frequent letters to the editor of the Daily Prophet. Barring Professor Quirrell, the murder of Cedric Diggory was Ernie's first personal brush with death. And the murder last month was the second.
A misty image of Albus Dumbledore floats up before him. Tall as a Titan, old as Cronos, eyes twinkling as he strokes his long white beard. Behind him swim two figures: Cedric Diggory, who was Hufflepuff's golden boy—and a prefect!—in days when Ernie only dreamed of such things, and Sally Abbott, forty-two years young, Scandinavian blonde, in the light of whose warm grey eyes shone the same shy, simple integrity that shines now in the honest gaze of her wan seventeen-year-old daughter. Without realizing it, Ernie reaches out to them, and the images fade into vapor, into teardrops, into mist, Cedric first, Sally Abbott, and the north star, his pole star, Albus Dumbledore.
His wand hand hangs limply in mid-air.
Professor Sprout had a private word with him at the funeral and told him what he already more or less knew. He has been running after the Head-Boy-ship for six years now, and he's got it in the bag, but he's not sure he wants to be Head Boy where Albus Dumbledore is no longer headmaster. He's not sure he wants to be Head Boy when the pole star is gone. He is half-dreading the letter that ought to arrive next week.
And yet the only thing worse than going back to Hogwarts now would be not going back. Hogwarts needs him. He's a prefect.
Hogwarts needs Hannah.
He needs Hannah.
As he muses, Hannah sits cross-legged on the floor beside him, the blonde pigtails that she still, at seventeen, wears around the house on Sunday mornings dangling in her face as she bends to disembowel the contents of a battered Hogwarts trunk: child-size robes cut in a style thirty years out of date, railway stall Muggle romances withered with moisture and age, a fragile starter wand, the sort that Ollivander sold cheap to the skeptical parents of the Muggle-born. She pulls out a deck of cards and a garish booklet entitled Fifteen Simple Card Tricks to Mystify Your Friends. "This is Granddad's idea of magic," she says. "This is what Granddad gave Mum when she went off to Hogwarts. I suppose that's about all he thought she'd learn there."
And he realizes, suddenly, that when Hannah said "we," she meant the Abbotts, the Abbotts and the Maeswicks, her mother's parents. "We" did not mean Ernie and Hannah.
"We're very alone," says Hannah. "Being Muggle-born is bad enough, but being Muggle-identified is almost worse. Everyone knows the Muggle-borns are vulnerable, and everyone looks after them. Even that goopy Professor Slughorn that you're always trying to impress, even he pays special attention to the Muggle-borns. Condescending attention, but he does pay attention. But everyone assumes that the Muggle-borns will give up their Muggle families, just cross over and forget them, the way Hermione Granger keeps avoiding her parents, even though they're perfectly lovely people. They took Benjy and me out for ice cream one summer when we ran into them in Diagon Alley, did you know? And now Hermione just goes around with the Weasleys all the time. She doesn't even bring her parents to Diagon Alley anymore. Everyone assumes that all the Muggle-borns will do that, that it only lasts one generation and you're in, but my parents chose to keep their Muggle families, and we all have to cross back and forth all the time, half a life here and half a life there, and no one on this side respects it, and no one on that side understands the first thing about the magical world, and it's just so damned hard . . ."
He has never heard Hannah say "damn" before.
"You need someone to talk to," says Ernie tentatively. "Does—does Sarah feel the same way?"
"When Sarah comes how from work she makes a plate of scrambled eggs and goes to bed with the VCR."
"Every night?"
Hannah's eyebrows are expressive.
"Justin," suggests Ernie. "Justin?"
"Oh," says Hannah. "He's written once or twice."
He has, has he, thinks Ernie, awash in a welter of conflicting emotions. He didn't say that to me.
"Well, actually five or six times," says Hannah, and Ernie suffers a painful surge of jealousy. "But it's so much easier for him. Justin's parents think it's all very charming, this magical gig, and they're so conveniently rich. If Lady Finch-Fletchley chooses to give out that her son is at a very select private boarding school in Switzerland, no one thinks to question her . . . and the family has such a long military tradition that none of them is weirded out about the war. I don't think they'd stop him if he wanted to train as an Auror."
"He hasn't got the marks to be an Auror," says Ernie, with quiet satisfaction.
"I haven't got the nerve to be an Auror," says Hannah elliptically. "An Auror, or a Healer, or a nurse . . . I don't even like to face my father in the morning."
"Is he very ill?" asks Ernie.
"Ill?" says Hannah, sounding surprised. "No, his health is good, except he's lost a little weight. He just—well, he's been a bit odd. And then he took a sleeping potion. I mean, he takes sleeping potions all the time. He's been taking sleeping potions all winter. But he mixed this one wrong. Or maybe he meant to mix it wrong. But if that's what he meant, he did that wrong too. That's why they want to put him in a sanatorium," she explains brokenly.
He realizes what she is saying. He's heard the facts before, but he never put them together. Now they sink in. They hit him squarely in the rib cage. He squints at the air where the images of Cedric, of Sally Abbott, of the north star, lingered, but they are gone, all gone.
"It's so quiet here," she bursts out after a minute, "it's just so, so quiet now, and we all need something to do. . . and so," she gestures, "and so I started cleaning."
He takes her in his arms and he holds her. He doesn't kiss her. Not yet. He just holds her, and holds her, and holds her, until the sun rises high and hot and angry in the sky, illuminating the cobwebs on the dusty sill, until his vision blurs and his arms ache, until he can't quite tell anymore, where she leaves off and he begins.
He doesn't know if there's life after death, beyond the veil, but there's life after death, on earth. Here.
Author note: Diana Summers's excellent essay, "Secrets of the Class List" (on the HP Lexicon), inspired me to place in Ernie in Glasgow and Hannah in Cumbria. For "Squibs only run in pureblood families," see Shinelikestars's essay, "Wizarding Genetics: More Complicated than Mendel," on the Sugar Quill.
I invented the category of Muggle-identified wizarding families. This is my compromise between fans' initial assumption that Hannah was Muggle-born (she is so listed on J.K. Rowling's original, non-canonical list of Harry's classmates) and the more recent speculation (see Wikipedia, for example) that Hannah may be a half-blood, as it is unlikely that Death Eaters would have targeted Mrs. Abbott had she not been a witch.